The number of prescriptions filled each year by pharmacies in the United States is fast increasing. This puts additional demands on pharmacies and pharmacists to fill prescriptions in a timely manner. Many people have experienced the frustration of a long wait at a pharmacy simply to have a common prescription filled or refilled.
There are numerous problems with the present system used for the dispensing of prescription medicines. First, current practices rely upon the memory of the prescription provider as to the pharmaceutical to be prescribed. This introduces a series of potential errors. Second, most prescriptions are produced without the aid of checking against a known database of allegories and interactions. Third, it primarily relies upon hand-written scripts that must be translated by a pharmacist. This injects a first level of translation error into the process, and often requires a pharmacist to verify a prescription with the prescribing doctor. This adds additional time and delay to the prescription filling process. Fourth, it requires patients to obtain scripts from their doctors and then travel to their pharmacy to have the prescription filled. Once at the pharmacy, patients may be subjected to delays and human error caused by pharmacists rushing to meet the accumulated demand.
Various attempts have been made to automate the dispensing of prescription drugs to address these issues. However, these attempts suffer from one or more of the following shortcomings. First, a critical concern in any remote dispensing situation (i.e., one where the dispensing is not under the direct control of a pharmacist) is that only an authorized person receive the medication and that the corresponding method of authorization should not be readily forged or compromised. Thus, a secure method of patient identification is required. These known systems typically generate a code at the time a prescription is generated. This code is then entered into a remote dispensing apparatus by a person desiring to obtain a prescription. However, this code is easily transferred to, or otherwise obtained by, persons who are not authorized to obtain the prescription. Further, most patients will record the code on a document rather than risk forgetting the code. This provides another mechanism by which an authorization code can be obtained by an unauthorized user. Thus, these known systems lack such a secure method of patient identification and introduce multiple points for such a code to be lost or otherwise compromised.
Second, because a pharmacist need not be present in remote dispensing situations, a remote dispenser must include multiple, redundant verifications to ensure that the prescribed medication, and only the prescribed medication is, in fact, dispensed. Known remote dispensing systems typically employ a single level of verification that is typically comprised of a barcode scan of a barcode that was applied by a repackaging pharmacy prior to loading of the product into inventory of the remote dispenser. If a product is mislabeled at the repackaging pharmacy, a single level of verification will not determine that the product is mislabeled, greatly increasing the possibility that an incorrect product is dispensed. Likewise, if a product package is improperly filled (quantity too high or too low), these known systems have no ability to determine this condition. Thus, there is a need for a remote dispensing system that provides multiple, redundant verifications to ensure that only the correct prescription is dispensed.
Third, the present systems lack coordination between the upstream pharmaceutical suppliers and the remote dispensing devices, such that an excessive amount of time and labor is required to restock the dispenser and verify that stocked drugs have not reached an expiration date, or have otherwise had their quality compromised (e.g., through a temperature transient).
Fourth, the present systems lack a secure method of transferring prescription medications from a repackaging pharmacy to a remote dispensing device and from a remote dispensing device to repackaging pharmacies.
Fifth, the known systems do not provide for a high density of product storage and the ability to randomly access any product contained in the inventory of the remote dispensing device. As a result, the frequency of need for human interaction to restock a remote dispenser is increased. Further, this lack of random access significantly limits the number of different products that can be stocked in a remote dispenser.
Accordingly, there is a need for an inventory control and prescription dispensing system that quickly and efficiently delivers prescription drugs to patients in locations where a pharmacist is not necessarily physically present, that minimizes the potential for translation errors between a prescriber and a pharmacist, that provides adequate security that prescription drugs are only dispensed to authorized persons, that provides multiple, redundant systems to ensure that correct prescription drugs are dispensed, that coordinates the restocking and quality control of prescription drugs available within the remote dispenser, that provides for a secure method of transporting prescription medications between a repackaging pharmacy and a remote dispensing device, and that provides for high density product storage and random access to products stored.